I realized that most “buddhist” pages on Insta are just secular EBT non-sense by Indian Ambedkarite buddhists who really don’t know what they’re doing.
This post by 2 top EBT-ambedkarite creators directly attacks Orthodox Theravada (Pali Canon being corrupted) with many claims and points throughout the 15 slide post. They use sources from books on the Pali Language by old western scholars, which is already questionable.
It would be great, if someone were to refute these claims.
When you smell bad milk, do you ask your mother to smell it for your?
“Mom is this bad?”
Not interested in even reading. Nothing can stop these people.
The thing about Modern “commentary”, is its so diverse you can literally find a modern commentary for any POV nowadays. So people just cling to whatever modern commentary says what already fits thier existing POV.
One of the scholars that page cites is Oskar von Hinüber, who literally argues that Bhikkhuni were never sanctioned from the Buddha and were a later addition. He argues Mahakassapa and Ananda had an internal civil war over this and Ananda’s faction won, thus creating the Bhikkhuni order. This sangha civil war is not recorded anywhere in the texts, but of course was just derived from his brilliant PhD deductive reasoning of the Early Buddhist Texts.
Thats why the official ancient commentary should be taken as authoritative. Or you can come up with any interpretation you want and pass that off as modern commentary/legit textual scholarship. Ive already seen a few modern scholars argue various suttas about heaven/hell are really allegorical. Why is that the case? Of course, only one possible explanation that its really allegorical. Because no self.
I’m somewhat of an outlier in that I read the suttas alone, without commentary. I understood them as they are laid out, pretty straightforward. Then I read bizarre modern takes that try to turn them into Samkhya eternal consciousness ghost worship, subjective idealism, and other nonsense. I was baffled and disturbed and actually swore off of Buddhism entirely for some time due to this. Then, and only then, did I look into the commentary tradition and find that they teach exactly what I already understood from the suttas. Thus, I was able to return to Buddhism as it is meant to be understood and how I understood it before being led astray by charlatans.
I think that’s more profound than it at first may seem.
Yes. if you simply read the suttas as is and dont use any kind of creative speculation. You’ll actually get a pretty similar interpretation to the official commentaries for the most part.
If you know Abhidhamma, and classical theravāda already, the commentaries often make total sense and match your thoughts when you check. It is for those who don’t have a proper base that start making up their own things. They just don’t know. I wrote a small article on this.
Take for instance The Buddha With Long Hair.
I made a consumer advisory video on this, telling people not to buy long haired Buddhas. They do so because they think the bump is from long hair tied in a bun. I said it was due to low faith or low knowledge that people buy these and request these rather than knowing about an unhīsa. They sell well and now they keep them in stock.
The negative comments caused the video to go viral and I pulled the video out of circulation. What negative comments? They objected to being called “low faith” and “low knowledge.” What else could it be? They either don’t know the characteristics of a real Buddha or they know and don’t believe. But the general population (of Westerners) were offended. Eventually I deleted my facebook account due to this experience as my videos started hitting the algorithm. I don’t want to teach the general public anymore, just for the same reasons I co-created this smaller our classicaltheravada group. It is small focused, like-minded and I want to keep my time and effort on such groups of people.
Thank you, Venerable. That certainly is all correct. It is also disheartening to hear that people were so disrespectful of a Venerable, despite themselves being objectively wrong. I think a lot of them learn secular philosophy of subjective idealism and/or Western religions with eternal soul/mind and then find Theravada and import all of their bias. Most are either simple minded and honestly cannot understand that their imported bias is incompatible, or they are willfully super imposing their ideas onto the dhamma.
I saw one guy on dhammawheel claiming that Westerners and Jesuits created the commentarial position that consciousness ceases at parinibbana. I told him that would mean they were time travelers because the commentaries were written over a thousand years before Westerners were aware of them. He did not even budge an inch and rather just reasserted his position. It is truly bizarre and makes me realize how simple most people are, or how so many have so much dust in their eyes to use a sutta euphemism. I just don’t understand the stubbornness and/or stupidity that causes these people to take someone else’s tradition and claim that their utterly heretical interpretation is the correct one and that the creators of the tradition are the true heretics. It is outrageous.
Those who play the EBT vs commentary and Abhidhamma game are questionable, and I do not agree with them, but they at least have a sane position when they isolate certain suttas and claim they, in that isolation, mean whatever they prefer them to. However, those who claim that the Abhidhamma and commentaries agree with their eternal consciousness ghost stories are the ones that actually give me the ick. They legitimately creep me out when they read a text that explicitly and clearly disagrees with them and claim it agrees instead. That position is a full on delusion that sounds like mental illness, at worst. At best it sounds like they have a severe learning disability that makes them incapable of understanding what they read.
There is a severe literacy crisis. It’s entirely possible that this explains the sheer number of people you have encountered on comments sections. They may be people who read well below the level they’re supposed to as adults and simply are incapable of understanding that they are incorrect. They are too simple minded to comprehend what they read. Many of them are only suited for 6th grade reading level or below and when they read complex dhamma teachings it’s beyond them, so they bridge the gaps in understanding with their own ideas. Then Dunning Krueger effect sets in and they think their misunderstanding is actually expertise.
From google:
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level.
Actually, education in the USA is now in big trouble. Everybody graduates from high school if they do not drop out. Many high-schools have a ban on giving zeros. You must give a 50% grade even if the student hands in an assignment that merely has only his name on it. Teachers have been fired for refusing to stoop so low to this standard. I myself, when I was a temporary teacher, was forced to give an incomplete to a student who did did ~14 typing lessons with 0% accuracy. I left, the job (to continue my travels and become a monk) and gave the “I” at the kind request of the principal after she backed me up in a special parent teacher meeting. Many universities dropped SAT scores from applications. Now, some universities are moving to pass/fail, especially in the first semester.
University professors are begging the admissions offices to increase the standards. You will see that GPA scores have gone up while actual knowledge has gone down. Google it.. Ask AI. This is the trend with helicopter (or lawnmower) mom’s dominating the educational administrations.
An undergraduate university degree was more or less useless in most people’s vocations, but it showed one important thing: you could finish a long-term goal that required discipline and persistence. A high school diploma was another bar before that.
In my time, if you had three unexcused absences (usually in gym class), you could not graduate. Degrees or diplomas mean nothing now. Employers are complaining. We are now in the “everybody gets a trophy” stage.
